The case decided Monday involves the technology that lets you tap your finger once on the touchscreen to call a phone number that is written inside an e-mail or text message. It also involves the technology that allows you to schedule a calendar appointment, again with a single tap of the finger, for a date mentioned in an e-mail.

There you go. A single tap is clearly such a singularly brilliant innovation that no one else on the planet should be able to use it. So instead HTC and others will have to use a double tap. Or a swipe. Or a tap and a popup menu. Or one of the other dozens of butt obvious ways to do something like this.

The field of finger gestures on touch screens is a microcosm of the entire farcical realm of software patents: obvious ideas getting tied up forever by whoever happens to be the first guy to write them down. If we had any brains at all, software patents would be consigned to the ash heap of history, where they belong.